His Body, Himself

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PROFILE of artist/filmmaker Matthew Barney... If you ask him, he will tell you that his work is sculpture. The five films in the "Cremaster" cycle are vehicles for the sculptures he makes for them, he has said, and the strange, nonverbal, and sometimes impenetrable stories that each film tells are also sculptures-narrative sculptures, or maybe sculptural narratives. To most of his admirers, however, Barney is primarily a filmmaker... The five "Cremaster"s, shot on video, were transferred to film and shown in movie houses and museum auditoriums here and abroad, and Barney soon gained a following as a new kind of auteur, one who uses autobiographical material, landscape, biology, architecture, dramatic actions, private fantasies, classical myths, elaborate costumes, prosthetic devices, and transforming makeup to create worlds that are unlike any you’ll see at the multiplex... The cremaster, as any Barney fan now knows, is the muscle that raises or lowers the testicles, in response to changes in outside temperature or involuntary reflexes. Ascending and descending actions of one kind or another have figured in Barney’s work since his undergraduate days at Yale, but in the "Cremaster" cycle it is not the muscle itself that really concerns us. It is, rather, the process of sexual differentiation that takes place within the womb... "There’s nothing disguised about Matthew," Chelsea Romersa, the associate producer of the last three "Cremaster"s, says, but even she finds him something of an enigma. For someone who frequently uses his naked body as a material for art, Barney in person reveals very little... Matthew Barney may be the first American artist whose early ambition was to play professional football. Growing up in Boise, Idaho, where his father ran a food-services company, he had been the quarterback on a high-school team that won the state championship one year and was runner-up for it the next... Tells how he worked as a model in New York City... Barney graduated from Yale in 1989, came to New York, and kept right on working, first in Brooklyn and then in a studio on Leroy Street that he shared with Michael Rees. He’d quit modelling by then... Writer describes the scene in the lobby of the Ritzy Cinema in South London, where Barney built a massive Vaseline sculpture for the London première of "Cremaster 3"... Mentions his liaison with Icelandic rock star Bjork and their baby girl... Mentions an upcoming Guggenheim exhibition-scheduled to open last year but postponed by the financially troubled museum-will give people a chance to see Barney’s work the way he wants it seen, with sculpture, drawings, and photographs shown alongside the videos. Barney is grateful for the larger audience that the "Cremaster" films have brought him, but in his mind the cycle was always a sculptural project. The exhibition, which drew big crowds and near-ecstatic reviews in its appearances, in the summer and fall of last year, at the Museum Ludwig, in Cologne, and the Musée d’Art Moderne, in Paris, will fill almost the entire space of the uptown Guggenheim. It is the culmination of eight years of work, and Barney clearly seems to be at a turning point in his life...